thoughts on brighton and other topics.

​Brighton is one of the British racecourses I have never visited, and, as I am in what used to be referred to as ‘my dotage,’ I doubt if I ever will. For some unfathomable reason, without ever setting foot in Sussex, let alone Brighton, I have a fondness for the place. I also have a fondness for David Ashforth, who I am pleased to see is writing for The Racing Post once more. I suspect Mr. Ashforth has a fondness for Brighton, too, as he does all worse-for-wear racecourses, I, again, suspect.
Mr. Ashforth, as with many of his colleagues at the T.R.P., can always be relied upon to knock racecourses with no greater ambition than to cater for class 5 & 6 racehorses, which I find annoying. What they should be knocking is the poor levels of prize-money on offer for lower-banded races as in most endeavours promotion and stability is usually achieved from the ground up and not the opposite way as the B.H.A. seem to prefer. I also object to this grade of racehorse being described as ‘bad’ or worse still, as one leading pundit said, ‘rubbish.’ 
If the B.H.A. were to suddenly ban racecourses from staging Class 5 & 6 races, what would happen to that grade of horse? There is no form of point-to-point race meetings for them to fall into and they would not be wanted for export to other racing jurisdictions. The meat market is where they would end up and what a poor look that would give the sport. Instead of being critical of the likes of Brighton for staging Class 5 & 6 races, there needs to be a push to get the B.H.A. to press racecourses to increase the value of these races by a thousand-pound or so. Indeed, as I have called-for in the past, there should be an aspiration for every meeting to have at least one race worth ten-thousand-pound to the winner. Small steps towards less embarrassing prize-money.

There is also a moan today about the sorry state of sprinters in Ireland, with most of the Group and top handicaps being won by British-trained horses. Sob! Sob! was my reaction. Heavens to Betsy, try being a British trainer of jumpers and watching the Irish hoards coming here time and time again and gobbling up most of our prize-money. So be it. Suck it up. It will do the whole of Ireland good to feel just a smidgen of the great pain Britain has suffered for a decade. You in Ireland have Willie Mullins and Aidan O’Brien. By heavens, do you want the whole of the cake all of the time?

Charlotte Jones has just become the latest female jockey to ride out her claim. It is a fine achievement for any young jockey, be them male or female, to ride the requisite 75-winners that reduces them from 3-Ib claimer to fully-fledged professional. The sad aspect for such a fine rider as Charlotte is that all of those 75-winners were from the stable of Jimmy Moffat. Of course, her dilemma is that if she spread her wings a little in an effort to achieve outside rides, she might then not be as available to ride for the man to whom she owes her career. I would advise her, if she does not already have one, to get herself an agent and, if she does not already, ride out once a week for one of the north’s leading stables to demonstrate to them how capable she is. She cannot moan about not being booked for outside rides if she stops herself from doing the hard yards of promoting herself. In my opinion, she is as good as any male professional and it would be unfair if she failed this season to get legged-up on winners for trainers other than the excellent Jimmy Moffat, a trainer who also deserves greater recognition for his talents.

Where has summer gone. Already we are approaching the King George & Queen Elizabeth Stakes – I somehow wish they would shorten the title to the Queen Elizabeth the 2nd Stakes, she deserves the honour, don’t you think? – Glorious Goodwood and the Galway Festival, with York’s Dante meeting on the horizon. Also, today, first news of Constitution Hill in T.R.P. He is hail and hearty, apparently, with Nicky Henderson reporting that he has never seen him looking better. In little over 4-months the big news story will be his reappearance in the Fighting Fifth. Soon be Christmas now!